23 December, 2025
When you write, you hope that all of the ideas that pop into your head lead somewhere. Often, that’s the case. Just as often, you get ideas that don’t pan out, in which you lose interest, or which just aren’t right for you.
Let’s peel back the curtain at Open Source Musings once again and look at some ideas for posts that didn’t go anywhere1.
AppFlowy
Remember when applications like Notion and Roam were all the rage among note taking and productivity enthusiasts? I tested out a few of them and, frankly, was left cold.
Then I heard about AppFlowy, an open source alternative to those applications which ran on the Linux desktop. I worked with it for a while and, to be honest, th…
23 December, 2025
When you write, you hope that all of the ideas that pop into your head lead somewhere. Often, that’s the case. Just as often, you get ideas that don’t pan out, in which you lose interest, or which just aren’t right for you.
Let’s peel back the curtain at Open Source Musings once again and look at some ideas for posts that didn’t go anywhere1.
AppFlowy
Remember when applications like Notion and Roam were all the rage among note taking and productivity enthusiasts? I tested out a few of them and, frankly, was left cold.
Then I heard about AppFlowy, an open source alternative to those applications which ran on the Linux desktop. I worked with it for a while and, to be honest, the same coldness that I felt with Notion, Roam, et. al. crept in. I didn’t connect enough with AppFlowy to muster the enthusiasm to review it.
AnyType
AnyType is yet another entrant in the note taking/personal knowledge management tool sweepstakes. It reminds me of applications like Obsidian and Logseq, which I’ve looked at in the past.
After taking a look at AnyType, I decided that 1) it was (like Obsidian and Logseq) just a bit too much for my needs, and 2) I wasn’t enthusiastic about or captivated enough by it to commit to a deep dive.
Books
Books is a simple application to access and organize your e-books on GNOME. Having more than a couple of ebooks on my hard drive, I dove in, thinking that a
Books just didn’t click with me. It didn’t offer anything, aside from being a bit lighter, than Calibre. And it didn’t offer much to write about, either.
Scriptorium
This one really excited me: a tool to plan, organize, and build a writing project. Kind of like a stripped-down version of Scrivener for Linux.
But my initial excitement cooled rather quickly after I installed Scriptorium and started using it. When I looked at Scriptorium, it quickly became apparent that the application was very work in progress. To my eyes, it wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. Or for me to write about it. Maybe sometime in the future …
Various Utilities
If you’ve been reading this space for any length of time, you know that I like a good, simple, focused little app. An app that does one, maybe two things and does that well.
And sometimes, I stumble across an application like that which excites me. And sometimes, that initial excitement quickly fades for any number of reasons. That’s happened recently with more than a couple of utilities.
If you’re wondering, I didn’t try hard to like any of these applications. Why? I don’t believe in forcing myself to like anything.↩︎